"Outbreaks of religious intolerance are usually assumed to be visceral and spontaneous. But in 'Hate Spin', Cherian George shows that they often involve sophisticated campaigns manufactured by political opportunists to mobilize supporters and marginalize opponents. Right-wing networks orchestrate th
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e giving of offense and the taking of offense as instruments of identity politics, exploiting democratic space to promote agendas that undermine democratic values. George calls this strategy “hate spin”—a double-sided technique that combines hate speech (incitement through vilification) with manufactured offense-taking (the performing of righteous indignation). It is deployed in societies as diverse as Buddhist Myanmar and Orthodox Christian Russia. George looks at the world's three largest democracies, where intolerant groups within India's Hindu right, America's Christian right, and Indonesia's Muslim right are all accomplished users of hate spin. He also shows how the Internet and Google have opened up new opportunities for cross-border hate spin." (Publisher description)
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"Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: "key issues of definition and of methodology, religious encounters with popular
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culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments, representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood." (Publisher description)
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"The study is based on the analysis of legends of 'Devon Ke Dev Mahadev', a mythological drama series that is shown on Indian television channel "Life OK" [...] The story revolves around Lord Shiva or Mahadev - the Lord of Lords as one of the three most powerful mythical characters. The serial is a
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popular serial because Hindu culture, like many other civilizations in the world, believes more in Devine power and the God and Goddess are the one supernatural entity. Mahadev is the obvious choice." (Page 19)
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"Shaman, paragon, God-mode: modern video games are heavily coded with religious undertones. From the Shinto-inspired Japanese video game 'Okami' to the internationally popular 'The Legend of Zelda' and 'Halo', many video games rely on religious themes and symbols to drive the narrative and frame the
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storyline. 'Playing with Religion in Digital Games' explores the increasingly complex relationship between gaming and global religious practices. For example, how does religion help organize the communities in MMORPGs such as 'World of Warcraft'? What role has censorship played in localizing games like 'Actraiser' in the western world? How do evangelical Christians react to violence, gore, and sexuality in some of the most popular games such as 'Mass Effect' or 'Grand Theft Auto'?" (Publisher description)
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"Why was there in the year 2000 a significant shift in the representation of families on Indian soap operas, from middle-class nuclear families with independent working women to upper-class joint families with only homemakers; and from milieus in which the religion of the characters was incidental,
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to milieus in which the Hindu religion and the performance of it was of central importance? I argue that a confluence of three forces enabled these shifts: (1) in marketing, a radical 'bottom-of-the-pyramid' approach; (2) in TV, the industry's attempts to find audiences in large numbers, mediated by the structure of the Indian audience measurement system; and (3) Hindu nationalists' focus on 'middle-class' audiences. In other words, I show how the very structure of the audience marketplace, especially the Indian television audience measurement system and shifts in marketing practices, abets the naturalization of particular political discourses within popular cultural forms, in this case Hindu nationalist discourse within television soap opera." (Abstract)
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"While acknowledging the contribution of the dominant Hindi Sanskritic narrative tradition to the shaping of popular Hindi cinema, this chapter aims to explore the alternative narrative streams that have governed storytelling in Hindi films, particularly the Perso-Arabic legacy of the qissa and dast
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an that has been erased or marginalised in the construction of national cinema. Through tracing the disruption of the dominant Hindu epic narratives by the Perso-Arabic qissa or dastan, it will show that it is the imbrication of the Perso-Arabic heritage with the Hindu Sanskritic that constructs the syncretic cinematic universe of the Hindi film." (Pages 183-184)
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"Digital Religion offers a critical and systematic survey of the study of religion and new media. It covers religious engagement with a wide range of new media forms and highlights examples of new media engagement in all five of the major world religions. From cell phones and video games to blogs an
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d Second Life, the book provides a detailed review of major topics; includes a series of case studies to illustrate and elucidate the thematic explorations; considers the theoretical, ethical and theological issues raised." (Publisher description)
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"On the whole, it seems religious television viewing had moderate or no influence whatsoever at attitudinal level among Hindu and non-Hindu viewers. In the light of the analysis, it is argued that strongly held religious beliefs and cultural dictates would not get influenced by religious television
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viewing as it lacked religious and spiritual sanctity." (Page 17)
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"How does religious fundamentalism operate in modern global society? This two-volume series analyses the dynamics of fundamentalism and its relationship to the modern state, the public sphere and globalisation. This second volume explores the links between fundamentalism and communication: the rise
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of fundamentalism as a mass media phenomenon, fundamentalist communication in the public sphere, national cultural identities and the rise of a 'global society'. Expert scholars in the field address specific contemporary and past fundamentalist movements that have emerged from within mainstream Islam, Christianity, Baha'ism, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism." (Publisher description)
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"This innovative, interdisciplinary collection of essays by scholars based in Europe and the United States offers stimulating approaches to the role played by religion in present-day South Asia." (Publisher description)